Textbook of AI

1815–1852, Mathematician; first programmer

Also known as: Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, Augusta Ada Byron

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician whose 1843 Notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contain what is generally regarded as the first published algorithm intended for execution by a machine: a step-by-step procedure for computing the Bernoulli numbers. The Notes , a translation, with extensive commentary, of an Italian article by Luigi Menabrea, are roughly three times the length of the article they annotate and constitute an original contribution in their own right.

Beyond the algorithm, Lovelace's Notes contain the earliest serious philosophical reflection on the limits and possibilities of computing machinery. She observed that the engine "might act upon other things besides number", anticipating symbolic computation by a century, and famously argued that "the Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." This claim, often called Lady Lovelace's Objection, was treated by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper as one of the standard objections to machine intelligence.

The daughter of the poet Lord Byron, she was tutored in mathematics from childhood at her mother's insistence, partly to inoculate her against what was feared to be the family tendency to "poetic" madness. She collaborated with Babbage from 1833 until her death from uterine cancer at the age of 36. The US Department of Defense's programming language Ada (1980) was named in her honour.